British school gets cyber security education right!

At the next stage – the children then learnt how to, momentarily, become spooks: “By teaching children Python, we could enable them to hack into these toys and turn them into covert listening and recording devices,” said Alan.Then the youngsters were asked to think of the worst-case scenario – if someone could hack into such a toy, then it could be possible for it to chat with, say, another smart voice enabled device. If that device was already set up for home shopping – then potentially the hacker could go on a spending spree.

I love this approach. Allowing the students to get into the mindset of the hacker opens up all kinds of new possibilities. When they see things from new perspectives, they learn to think in new and interesting ways. And in this case, they learn what they need to protect themselves against in a way I don’t think can be grasped fully without that perspective.